I didn’t have far to go. My suspicion that Darius and Roxy had been given the tent next to us was confirmed the moment I emerged to hear raised voices drifting from just next door. Kane and Hugh were sitting at the fire pit our little ring of tents encircled, both frowning. They met my gaze and I sighed before striding toward the tent.
It wasn’t possible to knock on a canvas flap. So I pushed it slightly aside and called out to announce myself.
“Dar? Roxy? Is everything okay?” I asked, knowing it absolutely wasn’t.
The tent fell silent for a moment before Roxy’s voice called back softly.
“Come in, Adrian.”
She sounded more exhausted than I could ever remember hearing her. I stepped tentatively inside, eyes sweeping back and forth to assess the situation before me. Darius had his back turned to me now. His arms were crossed, jaw so tense I could see it from the back as his toe tapped impatiently in the dirt. Roxy looked close to tears, her eyes wide and sad. I approached her first, laying a hand gently on her arm.
“If you don’t mind,” I whispered.
She gave one last glance toward Darius before nodding and slipping silently from the tent, sniffling softly as she went.
“The whole camp can hear you screaming at her,” I told him, bracing myself for him to begin yelling at me as well. So be it. At least Roxy would get a break.
“It’s none of their business,” he snapped.
I took a breath, trying to remain patient.
“We just got here,Dar,” I said. “We’re their guests. We can’t—”
“It’s not yours either.”
He whirled on me, eyes flashing with that simmering fury he seemed to always hold just beneath the surface lately.
“Are we going to do this again?” I asked with a sigh. “I’m sorry about what happened, Darius. I’m sorry you got dragged into all this, okay? It wasn’t my intention. None of this was what I intended. But you can’t go around screaming at everyone who tries to help you. Roxy—”
“Help me?” he shouted. “You think they’re trying to help us? They don’t care about us, Adrian. They want to use you and, to do so, they have to tolerate us. That’s it. They don’t want to help us. No one wants to help us.”
“Darius—”
“Do you have any idea what it feels like to be dragged from place to place, having my entire life uprooted again and again, because of choices someone else made for me? I had to lose you, Adrian. You and Dahlia and my parents and Sophie and Graham and everyone! My home! And then I was finally,finally, starting to make a new home in the Underground and you had to blast that apart too. Now we’re in the middle of somegodsforsakenforest preparing to fight theGeist? TheGeist, Adrian! The literal deities we were raised to believe in. And did I choose that? No. I haven’t made a single choice for myself in my entire life. Other people just keep swooping in and making decisions for me and no one, no one, has ever asked mewhat I want, what I think. Least of all you, my supposed best friend!”
Something snapped in me at his words, a thin tether of friendship stretching between us I hadn’t realized had grown so frayed until that moment.
“Do I know what it’s like? DoI? Are you kidding me, Darius?” I raged back at him. “Do you think I want this power? Do you think I asked to be born with some god-genocidal dark magic in my blood? Do you think I’m not terrified to use it, to become what they want me to become, even if it means taking revenge on the beings that made those choices for us? Because it was theGeistwho Culled you, Darius. Not me. And it’s theGeistwho are after us now, who are the reason these people were waiting to pull us out of the Underground and bring us here. If you want to place blame, at least throw it in the right direction.”
“You broke the Underground, Adrian,” he snarled, stepping closer to me until his face was only inches from mine, his finger pointed into my chest. “You put all of Sanctuary at risk. Our families, our friends. You think theGeistare just going to leave the place alone after you destroyed their wards? You think it hasn’t caused chaos above and below? The wards are down, Adrian. Do you have any idea what that means?”
I hesitated, blinking. I understood what he was saying for the first time. If the wards were down, there was nothing stopping the ones below from going above and vice versa. If anyone knew, the secret of the Underground would be out and there was no way theGeistwould allow that to go unanswered. But Darius hadn’t seen what I had that day I made the tunnel collapse.
“They beheaded a boy from the lower rings,” I said, my voice low.
Darius reeled back, surprised.
“What?” he gasped.
“That day, when I made it back to Sanctuary, I saw the Culling again. From their side, like before,” I explained. “Only this time there was no ceremony, no one stepping willingly through the portal. They were refusing to go and, because of that,Cosmobeheaded one of their brothers.”
Darius was shaking now. I didn’t blame him. But he was right. I put our home at risk. I exposed an entire city of people living in blissful ignorance to the dangerous truth, a truth that could get them killed if they didn’t react the proper way to it.
“He’s a fanatic,Dar,” I whispered, tears slipping down my cheeks. “Cosmorules by divine right of theGeist, claiming his family is chosen, blessed. If the truth about them ever got out in Sanctuary, he would do everything he could to crush it before it could call his power into question. Darius, he killed a child.”
Darius stepped away, pacing to the other end of the tent as he ran a hand through his hair. A moment of silence stretched between us before he spoke again.
“And what do you want me to do about it?” he asked.
